Another evacuee shared my bed, and we explored the country roundabout, roaming quarries for newts to put in a jam jar, so that it wasn’t long before Worksop and its environs was as familiar as my native Radford. The Cutts left us free to come and go, the only rules being that we had to sit down to a hot dinner at midday, and finish supper by eight o’clock at night. For breakfast there was porridge and toast, and sometimes a treat of tinned pineapples at tea. When the trousers I arrived in became unfit to wear Mr Cutts bought me new ones out of his own money.
I was fascinated, possibly infatuated, by a girl called Laura, who lived in a caravan of the gypsy sort on some nearby waste land. Her parents sold crockery from a horse-drawn cart in the mining towns roundabout. On once referring to them as ‘gypsies’ Mrs Cutts gently corrected me: ‘They aren’t gypsies, Alan, they’re “travellers”,’ though no offence had been meant by me, because ‘gypsy’ sounded more romantic.
The idea of going to school in a strange town was not to my liking, but the day came when Mr Cutts ordered a general sprucing up and took me to a building much like the one in Radford. My teacher, he said, had been his captain in the Great War, and would be sure to look after me providing I behaved myself. This cohering microcosm of society seemed strange after the non-hierarchical homogeneity in Radford, where my father avoided everyone except an equally destitute friend or two.
At school I was commended for an essay on ‘The Great Nottingham Warehouse Fire’, perhaps my first piece of fiction, for it had never happened, though the conflagration was lovingly described. I joined the public library and took books into the Cutts’ home, the only one found there being a spy novel by William le Queux.
It was easier to get into the adult cinema, and also cheaper than in Nottingham, though try as we might the ushers would not let us pass to see a French film about venereal disease called Damaged Goods. Still, we saw H for Horror films such as Dracula and The Vampire Bat, which more than made up for our disappointment.
An indefinite stay in Worksop would have been to my liking, but one morning a letter from home was handed to me by Mrs Cutts, who had paid the postman, since it had come without a stamp. I immediately imagined that my father had lost his job, that my mother hadn’t even the money to spare for postage, that they were once more on the edge of penury and fighting as bitterly as ever. In the letter she merely asked how I was getting on, and told me that all was well at home, but the air of gloom lasted for days at the implication of the missing stamp.
The matter was easily explained. She had given the letter to a girl in the street, and the twopence-halfpenny for a stamp, as well as a penny for her trouble, to take to the post office. But the girl had spent all the money on sweets, and dropped the letter in the box to get rid of it. Nevertheless, the spell of my idyllic life in Worksop was broken, and in any case, not long afterwards, when I had been there about three months, my mother wrote to say she was coming to take us home.
The Cutts were sad, and so was I, because there had been talk between Mr Cutts and his captain of trying even at this late stage to get me into a grammar school. When my mother arrived the Cutts laid out a good tea, and wondered why she wanted to take me back. ‘The war might go on for years,’ she told them, ‘and Nottingham ain’t likely to get bombed.’
Mr Cutts was sceptical about that. ‘The war hasn’t begun yet. You’d do best to leave him, I’m telling thee.’
In one way I felt no wish to leave, but change was also attractive. If I had shouted definite objections to going back it might have been possible to stay, and perhaps that was what the Cutts were hoping for, yet I was finally without will one way or the other as if, during such periods of decision, it was only possible to live from minute to minute rather than with any sense of days or weeks.
We said goodbye, then followed my mother to collect the rest of her children, and went together to the bus station. I took back more than I had brought in the form of clothes and goods, and an interesting view on how other people could live. On the other hand, being an outsider, such knowledge hadn’t been earned the hard way by having to grow up in the family. If that had been the case it might have seemed little better than my own, except that there would have been more food to eat and better clothes on my back. But I never forgot how good the Cutts had been to me.
Chapter Ten
Nottingham seemed a different place after Worksop: there was a war on. My father laboured again at the sugarbeet factory, and would come home every day with half a pound of purloined sugar in his mashcan — of which there was already a shortage — adding it to a cache in one of the cupboards.
School at the normal place was discontinued, but classes were held in Wollaton Hall a mile or so away, and it was put about that we should go if we could. Arthur Shelton and I chose not to for a while, relishing the freedom to roam. By a railway bridge near the Trent a solitary soldier manned a Lewis gun in his sandbagged outpost, looking over what we could see as a wonderful field of fire. An army lorry stopped close by, and a soldier took a slice of bread and a mug of tea to the Lewis gunner, before getting back into the cab and driving to the next lonely sentinel.
The wherewithal to construct an Anderson shelter was dumped in our patch of back garden, and my father, one of the few in the terrace to accept one, dug out the soil into which it would fit, the dimensions suggesting no more than a rather wide grave. He then pieced the curving panels of corrugated tin together and put planks inside for us to sit on, dubious that such a cubby hole would be much help if a bomb fell anywhere near, but padding plenty of soil over the top nevertheless.
One morning when my mother went across the street to fetch a breakfast loaf she saw a soldier standing forlornly in the shelter of the shop doorway. On her coming out he asked if she knew where he could get a cup of tea. ‘Yes, my duck,’ she said unhesitatingly, ‘come back to our house, and we’ll give you one.’
Over the breakfast that went with it he told her he had gone absent without leave from his nearby anti-aircraft artillery unit, and she let him stay with us, sleeping on the settee in the living room for six weeks. I was persuaded to give up my Identity Card, on which he rubbed out my name and inscribed his own, so that he could go to the Labour Exchange and apply for a job. This was a successful ruse, and he would have lived out the war working in a factory had not a neighbour suspected that he was a deserter and told the police. When in court for, among other things, having a false Identity Card, he said he had stolen it rather than incriminate my mother or myself.
After a few sessions at Wollaton Hall, school was resumed in the normal buildings. Nineteen forty opened with a severe winter of ice and snow, and if the Germans had thought to bomb at that time the Anderson shelter would have been no more than an igloo. In minus zero temperatures my dress was basic: shoes and socks, short trousers, a shirt next to my skin, a jersey, and a jacket, though I rarely felt more than merely cold. When Arthur Shelton and I cycled the seven miles to Stanton Iron Works near Ilkeston my physical being seemed to divide in two, the part that felt the effect of the heavy frost slowly benefiting from that dominant part of me which had a warm enough stove glowing inside to heat both.